Love was for suckers.

Jessa doodled on the tanned inside of her left wrist, tracing the blue line of a vein into a mountain range. There were no mountain ranges in suburban Illinois, but she could imagine mountains. She could imagine a lot of things, like a world where her best friend hadn't been consumed in a fiery torrent of hormones, then had her ashes scattered at the pinnacle of Jake Shulman Mountain.

It was a heavy image, but better than thinking of Ona and Jake having sex somewhere in the house behind her. Bass from the summer party pulsed through the night, hitting her heart off-beat. Actual music vented from the house whenever someone stumbled out the door and onto the porch, only to be stopped by the unkempt grass, the darkness, the look of abandon of the yard that sloped off into a rough forest-look-a-like, a clump of trees that divided Jake's house from the nearby highway.

Jessa's mountain range developed a steep, ragged looking peak, like a broken tooth sticking up out of the earth. She tucked the pen behind her ear and sank back into the tall, wild grass of Shulman's backyard, running her fingers through individual blades, feeling it tickling at the back of her neck. Indigo spread across the sky like dye in water, the horizon dipped in red from nearby city light. Fireflies phased in and out of the dusk.

Guitar strings snapped the air as someone pushed the rusty screen door open, bad music filling the silence like a puff of smoke dispersing into the night. Jessa poked her head up, hoping for Ona. As the red cherry of a cigarette burned into the dark, she hid back in the grass. Ona was into a lot of terrible things: self-tanner, diet pills, and bleach, but cigarettes weren't on the list.

Not until her next boyfriend told her she looked hot while smoking, or something equally disgusting. Why would she have been dumb enough to hope for Ona? She had probably forgotten she even invited Jessa to the party.

Jessa's eyes were fixed on the firefly light show as the smoker's steps came nearer. She waited until there was a good chance she'd get stepped on before she cleared her throat, giving away her presence.

"Shit." The yelp was high-pitched, followed by the sound of the smoker tripping over his own ankles, landing in the grass with a graceless thud.

Jessa pushed up onto her elbows as a courtesy, examining the prone figure beside her. She had barely escaped getting kicked in the head. Next time she'd speak up sooner.

The smoker, whose cigarette glowed in the dark, having escaped any untoward fate, looked only mildly familiar. His hair was closely shaved and dark, his brow thick over brown eyes with heavy black lashes. His mouth was thin, a pale old scar adorning his upper lip.

"Sorry." Jessa's voice was sullen as lead. Her companion waved a hand and took a drag from his cigarette, turning his head to blow the smoke away from her.

Jessa sat up a little more, pushing her unkempt brown hair behind her ear, knocking the pen out of its place.

They reached for it at the same time. Jessa snatched the pen away, but noticed his hand—wide, short-clipped nails with stained cuticles. Tanned skin and dirt in the creases of his palm.

"That's cool." He gestured to her arm.

Jessa shrugged.

They sat there in their own silence, the rest of the night providing enough sound to keep them satisfied. Bad music, shrill laughter, crackling cricket legs and not-too-distant traffic.

"How do you know Jake?"

Jessa mimed vomiting, jabbing her index finger into her throat.

"He sells you those weird diet pills?"

"Ugh." Was there anyone in the world she hated more than Jake Shulman? Jessa shook her head at the question. "He used to sell them to my friend Ona."

"His girlfriend?"

"Yeah. I'm guessing she gets them for free now." Jessa jabbed her pen into the ground in an aimless pattern, feeling the soil give way into small craters.

"Hmm." The guy didn't say anything else. He laid back on his forearms, mimicking Jessa's earlier pose.

She didn't want to ask his name, but the question itched at a spot between her shoulder blades. He interrupted before she gave in to the urge to scratch.

"Ona's here all the time. Why haven't I seen you?"

Jessa fixed her gaze on the smoker. What a terrible name. She shrugged again. "I'd rather swim in raw sewage than hang out with Ona and Jake at the same time."

He coughed as he laughed, the sound sandpaper rough in his throat. "Speak your mind, why don't you."

"I'm sorry if he's your friend," Jessa said, grinding the point of the pen into the soft plastic of her flip-flops.

"I take no offense."

"No, I'm sorry if he's your friend," Jessa repeated. "It's pretty tragic."

He shook his head, glancing back at the house as another drunk couple stumbled out onto the rickety back porch. Jessa wondered if they'd magnetically pull him back into the party and she could have her patch of wild grass back.

"We used to be friends," the smoker said. "I guess my life is a little less tragic now."

Jessa nodded her approval. "Good choice."

He tilted his head to the side, pursing his lips and swiping the pen from Jessa's idle hand.

"Hey." Jessa lunged at him, trying to steal the pen back, but he pulled it out of her reach. She steadied herself against his shoulder, pushing back and sitting back on the warm earth.

"That's my pen," she said, dusting her hands off on her shorts.

"I'll trade you."

Jessa rolled her eyes. "It's a two dollar pen, so don't get your hopes up."

He held out his right arm, the pen clutched in his dirty hand. "You can have the pen back if you draw on my arm."

"What do you want me to draw?"

"Anything."

Jessa barked a laugh. "Anything?"

He opened his palm, offering her the pen. She took it with her right hand, then pulled his forearm into her lap with her left. He leaned away, stubbing the cigarette out on the ground, then scooted closer. Jessa admired the canvas of his skin, the warm tan, the faint white lines that reminded her of running through scratchy brambles behind Ona's house when they were younger.

Jessa let the world sink away. The music from the house became a low, slow drumbeat. The city lights on the horizon dimmed, turning down the sky. She ran her hand over the smoker's skin as she drew, feeling his pulse under her fingers as she turned his wrist back and forth.

She sketched an outline first, feathery and light. Lines stretched across his arm, growing and changing as she added detail.

"Is it a skyline?" he asked.

She shushed him.

"Or mountains?"

This time, she glared.

"I'm Victor," he said.

"Jessa." She went back to the drawing, sensing that exchanging names had bought her a short bout of silence. They breathed and waited as she sketched. Victor was patient. He didn't interrupt her again until she was almost done, when it was plain to see what she'd drawn.

"A forest."

"A gold medal to the gentleman with the dirty hands." Jessa wrote her initials at the base of one of the trees, admiring the overall effect.

Victor grabbed the pen from Jessa's fingers and pulled his arm away.

"I wasn't done." Jessa went to reach for the pen, but he was already pushing himself up to his feet.

"Yeah, you are. I should have expected it from someone who hangs out with Ona."

Jessa sighed. "What?"

Victor reached into his back pocket, retrieving a crushed pack of cigarettes. He tapped on the bottom of the near-empty pack, retrieving a cigarette and letting it dangle from his lips as he patted at his pants. He knelt by Jessa again, running his hands through the grass and circling his way around her.

"You know, this is the weirdest way anyone has ever been mad at me," Jessa said. She didn't like being goaded into speaking, but this time he didn't seem ready to break the silence for her.

Victor waved a hand in front of her face. Jessa smacked his hand away on reflex, leaning back as she did so. His cigarette dropped from his mouth. Her other hand landed on the soft, rounded plastic of a Bic lighter, her fingers closing around it and slipping it into her back pocket as she stood up.

"Nothing to say about my hands now?" Victor's voice was sharp with thorns.

Jessa threw her hands up into the air as she backed away through the tall grass. "I have no idea what you're talking about. Your hands are dirty. So what?" She rolled her eyes and glanced back toward the house. Now that the earlier spell was broken, the music was louder than ever. The drunk couple from earlier was grinding up against the wall. Jessa reconsidered returning to the house, standing her ground and staring at Victor.

"Well? What did I say?" she asked.

Victor blinked, the motion releasing some of the tension in his brow. "My hands."

Jessa swept at the air with her own hands, trying to get him to keep talking.

"Jake and Ona..." he trailed off. "I work at a mechanic shop on the edge of town. I can't get the oil out of my hands some days. She..."

"She said something horrible and stupid and untrue and you can't get it out of your head?" Jessa guessed.

It was his turn to shrug. "I'm just trying to save money for college."

Jessa turned back to the house, glancing up at the window of Jake's bedroom. The curtains were drawn, but she yelled at it anyway.

"God forbid someone make money without selling drugs!"

Victor strode up to Jessa and pulled on her arm. "Quit it."

Jessa shook him off. "I will yell anything I want."

A smile curled at the edge of Victor's lips. "What if we didn't yell?"

They hiked through the tall grass, down out of the Shulman yard and toward the strange not-forest that separated suburbia from the highway. Brambly bushes grew thick between the trees, and Jessa regretted not wearing long pants. She followed Victor through the undergrowth, small scratches of fire tugging at her skin as she walked. The highway music got louder and louder until they were on the asphalt shoulder, surrounded by the detritus of a thousand fast food meals. They walked through wax and foil wrappers that skittered on the roadside like industrial leaves. It was hard to hear each other over the cars, but these became less frequent as they walked. The time had come for people to close themselves in their homes and forget about the world outside.

Jessa handed Victor his lighter, which he took without speaking. He retrieved his last cigarette and crushed the now-empty box back into his pocket. He stood between her and the road, holding the cigarette in his left hand and blowing smoke away from her. She hated it, but on the scale of all the things that she hated at the moment, it didn't rank too highly.

"She used to be nice," Jessa said. The uneven ground swayed her toward Victor, so that every few steps she would graze his arm. He didn't move away.

"Believe it or not, Jake used to be pretty decent, too."

Jessa tapped her closed fist against the side of her leg, trying to soothe the angry scratches on her skin. "She got worse around him."

Victor took a drag off his cigarette, exhaling before answering. "He did, too."

"I thought love was supposed to make people better."

Victor coughed, clearing his throat. "I don't know what it's supposed to do."

They were quiet the rest of the way, held together by the illusions they carried on their skin. Her mountains, his forest. The bright fluorescent lights of the gas station-convenience store drew them in like dazed moths. Jessa's flip-flops made shallow smacks on the tile floor inside the store. She followed Victor to the refrigerated shelves along the walls, running her hands along displays of candy, potato chips, and travel-size toiletries.

At the checkout counter, they dug into their pockets, dumping crumpled dollar bills and coins to rattle on the plastic. The cashier stared with chalk eyes as they counted their meager fortune.

"That's enough, right?" Jessa asked.

Victor glanced at the wall behind the cashier, the neat stacks of colorful little boxes.

"We can only afford one," she said. "Pleasure or revenge."

The edge of Victor's smile caught again. "Easy choice."

They created more sound on the way back. Jessa complained about the scratches on her legs, and Victor made sympathetic noises, although it was too dark for him to really see them. She told him about her job at the ice cream store. She skipped the part where Ona told her that working at an ice cream store would make her fat.

Well, fatter. Ona thought that everyone was fat already.

The flimsy bag from the convenience store gained heft as they walked.

"How did you know?" Victor asked.

"Clairvoyance."

"No, seriously."

"Seriously," Jessa teased. She bumped her shoulder against his side. "I don't know what you're talking about, again. How did I know what?"

"The trees."

She shrugged, glancing at her feet and then back at him. His eyes were intent, as though the answer mattered.

"I don't know. You like it?" She gestured at her sketch then, in a moment of bravado, ran her hand over the drawing on his arm. His skin felt different now. Warmer. More electric.

Victor nodded. He held her hand as they clambered back through the bushes. Halfway in, he took the grocery bag and had her climb onto his back. She would have objected, but she already had half a dozen scratches on her legs. Nostalgia had let her forget how much a single scratch could sting. Six of them together were a veritable choir of pain. He left her down on the other side of the trees.

They followed the thump of bad music toward Jake's house. His bedroom window was open, the curtain pulled back, casting a rectangle of light into the night.

"Huh," Victor said. "That's perfect."

"I texted Ona a link to an article that says night air keeps you young. And thin."

Victor squinted at Jessa. "There's an article about that?"

"There's an article about everything." Jessa pointed at the window. "Are you ready?"

His first egg flew wide, hitting the beige wall. Jessa's splattered above the window, egg dripping down onto the glass. Victor's aim improved on the second, and he hit the window itself. Jessa's sailed through the open window. Keyed in, the next few eggs all arced through the window in quick succession.

Someone screamed. Jessa's teeth glinted in the dark as she smiled. Ona's silhouette, her hair spritzed into cardboard-stiffness around her head, appeared at the window. She ducked through the opening and stuck her head into the darkness to scream.

"WHAT. THE-"

Jessa and Victor threw an egg at the same time, both hitting the window. Eggshell splattered against the glass above Ona's head. Raw egg dripped onto her hair. Her next scream was wordless, shrill as a whistle.

Jessa dropped the egg carton and took Victor's hand. They bolted out of the yard, past Jake's house and toward the street. Ona kept screaming in the distance, the sound almost supernaturally steady.

Victor didn't let go of her hand, and they didn't stop until they were three blocks away. They slowed down and walked toward the shadows of someone's covered porch, laughing as their breathing steadied. There were no cars in the driveway, no lights on in the house. They sat on a loveseat on the porch. Jessa wrapped her arms around her knees, having almost forgotten about her scratches. They waited in silence until Jake's pickup, with its lift kit and bass-heavy sound-system, rattled through the neighborhood. He whipped past them. Ona's high-pitched voice was audible even over his music.

"Isn't that sweet." Jessa laughed. "They can lean on each other in times of trouble."

"I guess they still have that," Victor agreed.

They sat in the dark, nothing but breathing and racing hearts, strange dreams of landscapes they couldn't find in their suburban surroundings. Victor's arm slipped around Jessa's shoulders. She settled back against him, not looking his way.

"They had it coming," he said. His hand played with her hair.

She smiled like lightning. "Definitely."

Love, she thought, her fingers idly running a pattern on Victor's leg, is for suckers. 

* * *

First photo: Fireflies by Takashi Ota (takot) on Flickr

Second photo: Fireflies by xenmate on Flickr

Third photo: Firefly by tsaiian on Flickr